Reliance Jio Infocomm said that the call drop situation on its network worsened over the last few weeks. It blamed larger rivals Bharti AirtelBSE 0.41 %, Vodafone India and Idea CellularBSE 1.03 % for not providing points of interconnection (PoIs) earlier despite repeated requests. While welcoming Airtel’s move to release additional PoIs, Jio on Tuesday said it hopes Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular “will enhance the PoIs sufficiently to meet their license obligation of QoS (quality of service) with immediate effect and maintain these parameters on an ongoing basis.”
Reliance, however, was scathing in its criticism of Airtel and the other incumbents, saying India’s No.1 telco, didn’t act “for the last several weeks” on the new entrant’s periodic requests for more PoIs.
“Necessary details have been provided to Airtel from time to time, highlighting the urgency of the requirement and the impact on Quality of Service parameters. However, no action was taken for the last several weeks, resulting in non-compliance of TRAI regulation on quality of service which mandates that POI congestion should not affect more than 1 call in every 200 calls made,” Jio said.
It added the in the last few weeks, over 75 of every 100 call attempts from Jio’s network have failed. In last 10 days, over 22 crore calls made from Jio to the Airtel network have failed, while 52 crore calls cumulatively made from Jio to the the three incumbent operators - Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular - failed.
“RJIL has been raising the issue of insufficient POIs as anti-competitive aimed at hindering the entry of a new operator. We have repeatedly appealed to the incumbent operators to create a fair and reciprocal framework of coo petition that is good for India and good for Indian customers,” Jio said.
The company, which launched commercial operations on September 5, also termed “unsubstantiated” the incumbent telcos’ apprehensions regarding asymmetric voice traffic, saying over time, as Jio’s subscriber base grows, traffic will become symmetric.
“Voice traffic on its (Jio’s) network is in line with industry trends and as expected for any new operator in the early days of operations of any new operator, there are more outgoing calls than incoming calls,” it explained. It further added that the telco’s outgoing traffic was less than two calls per customer per hour even during peak traffic period - spread across all operators - which requires only a reasonable number of PoIs.